How mentoring benefits professionals (and boosts business)

The effect of being mentored by senior people in insurance and loss adjusting still resonates for Craig McLeod, even though it was three decades ago.

Now the head of quality and people development at Crawford & Company, McLeod is responsible for designing development opportunities to attract and retain talent within his organisation. These opportunities include mentoring programs.

When McLeod was a 20-year-old mentee, he entered a profession that demanded deep insight and detailed reporting, and where learning on the job was taken very seriously.

“Mentoring gave me the opportunity, at a young age, to become well-qualified in loss adjusting and to handle assignments I wouldn’t have otherwise had the opportunity to take on,” he says.

“If I didn’t have access to development through these mentors, and the emphasis they placed on further learning, training and development, I would have had far fewer opportunities. It prompted me to leave Adelaide and move across Australia to Sydney to advance my career.”

Ongoing training is a great development tool for employees, McLeod says. Courses that add to one’s professional knowledge, as well as opportunities to work across various departments, are all beneficial. But nothing comes close to the power of a good mentoring relationship.

“That’s where you get traction with people, in that one-on-one relationship where you’re dealing with a real-life business situation and you’re bouncing around ideas and challenging people,” he says. “That is key — challenging people and helping them challenge their own clarity.”

A Mentorloop industry report on the financial sector confirms the many benefits of mentoring in financial services. Identified outcomes include greater career clarity, better self-esteem and sense of belonging, stronger emotional intelligence, more diverse perspectives and broader professional networks.

A fresh take on an old idea

Mentorship is not new. In fact, it is ancient.

In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, written around 2700 years ago, the character Mentor offers guidance and support to Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. From that poem, the term “mentor” came to represent an experienced, typically older person who helps guide a younger, less experienced one.

More recently, there have been countless examples of high-profile mentoring relationships, including author and poet Dr Maya Angelou taking Oprah Winfrey under her wing, Steve Jobs guiding a young Mark Zuckerberg during the early days of Facebook (now Meta), and designer Christian Dior helping shape the career and success of Yves Saint Laurent.

 

"Maybe the young person provides insights to the older person on emerging technologies or new trends that are important to the mentor’s customer demographic. The relationship can become, over time, mutual or reciprocal learning."

 

The power of mentorship, whether in the public sphere or elsewhere, comes from the sharing of experience, guidance and confidence-building competence. It is something that Lisa Sweeney, CEO of Business in Heels, has built a following around as she and her team connect individuals with a passion for sharing their insight to those with a hunger for knowledge.

“Most people with less experience in their work are, of course, limited by their own knowledge,” Sweeney says. “Being challenged by other people and learning from their experiences and knowledge will stretch and add to your thinking.”

“It is not necessarily about doing what they’ve done, although mentoring absolutely helps individuals to avoid repeating potentially costly mistakes. Mentoring is about stretching people’s thinking in a way that helps them be more innovative and enables them to solve complex problems. It is so valuable because it helps to fast-track people.”

CPA Australia’s Global Mentoring Program matched over 650 mentor–mentee pairs in 2024 alone. Marios Pasas CPA, head of finance services and enterprise risk at InfraBuild, is a past mentor in that program.

“The purpose is to help that person up to the next level,” Pasas says. “To get them to start believing more in themselves, to understand the strengths that they may not realise they have and to help them better utilise those strengths.”

CPA Australia’s program provides careful matching of goals and backgrounds, and has resulted in an almost 90 per cent satisfaction rating.

Outside of formal mentoring programs, well-suited pairs will often find each other, says Professor Julie Cogin, provost of Australian Catholic University.

“In Australia, we’re starting to see less structured mentoring programs and younger generations coming into mentoring via a more informal and organic process,” explains Cogin, who has authored several research papers on knowledge sharing between generations, based on research across numerous countries.

“People with similar interests gravitate toward each other, so the mentee just comes forward and asks,” she says.

“In countries such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan, there is still a prevalence of more formal programs,” Cogin continues. “In these territories, the fact that you are part of one of those high-potential programs would be an honour and would single you out as a rising star in the organisation.”

A mutual exchange

There are other notable differences between cultures, Cogin says. In China, one of the sample countries in her research, there is a powerful level of respect for wisdom and age. This creates a hierarchical relationship based on the mentor teaching the mentee, and the mentee learning and following instructions.

“In Australia, it is more of a mutual exchange,” she explains. “Maybe the young person provides insights to the older person on emerging technologies or new trends that are important to the mentor’s customer demographic. The relationship can become, over time, mutual or reciprocal learning.”

Eastern cultures are also more likely to be made up of a senior mentor and a junior mentee. In Australia and other Western countries, the mentee might have multiple mentors or what Cogin refers to as a “committee of mentors”, where each mentor might represent a different area of expertise.

 

"The purpose is to help that person up to the next level… To get them to start believing more in themselves, to understand the strengths that they may not realise they have and to help them better utilise those strengths."

 

McLeod says that there is an additional benefit for mentors when they are retired or semi-retired in that they remain involved and engaged with the business, and feel valued as a result of their role.

Plus, the company gets to keep valuable, experienced players in reserve.

“They may no longer be involved in full-time work, but they want to give something back and it suits their lifestyle,” McLeod says. “A couple of our mentors are semi-retired and they are a very valuable resource.”

Sweeney says being a good mentor is often as much about listening as teaching.

“Quite often, the mentee’s perspective challenges the mentor,” she says. “So, a lot of senior people also use mentoring as a way to stay in touch with what’s happening, to really understand what’s going on within an organisation at a grassroots level or to understand a different part of the business.”

What makes a good mentor?

A mentor is not a sponsor or a coach. For mentors, the role is about more than passing on technical skills.

“You’ve got to be diplomatic and develop a relationship of trust,” McLeod says. “I’ve worked with people where I’ve seen potential in them and I’ve decided to be quite hard on them, knowing they’ll take it in the right spirit.” This is different to sponsorship, he explains, which is typically about supporting someone who is more junior to build their confidence.

Consistency of behaviour and messaging in the role of mentor is crucial.

“My greatest fear as a mentor is about steering off the path of consistency because of my mood, something else going on in my day or in my life,” he says. “You’ve just got to be brutally consistent.”

Cogin agrees, stressing the importance of clarity in the framework of the relationship.

“You can have mentor–mentee relationships that are not a good use of time for either party,” Cogin says. “To avoid this, you have to be clear about what you want to achieve during a 50-minute meeting. The mentee needs to take responsibility for this.”

Pasas says the mentee effectively has to be encouraged out of their comfort zone to receive the greatest benefit.

“The goals and desired outcomes need to be driven largely by the mentee,” he says. “If it becomes a situation where the mentee feels they’re being managed, it is not really going to achieve what is needed.”

The structure of the relationship should be clearly defined, just like any other project within a business. This includes agreements on expectations, and how long the mentoring arrangement will last. As long as the relationship is properly structured, it is likely to be mutually beneficial, Pasas explains.

“You need the time to make it a success for the mentee,” he says. “If it is set up for six to 12 months, maybe with a meeting once a month for an hour, that should work. It should have a bit of a cadence to ensure everyone involved remains disciplined and accountable.”

People can also grow out of mentoring relationships, Cogin acknowledges. “Sometimes the mentee will want to go off and do something else,” she says. “One year is a good length of time. A number of universities have alumni–student mentoring programs that are typically structured over nine months.”

However long the official mentoring relationship, they often result in lifelong friendships. McLeod is still in touch with the two mentors that had such an effect on his career decades ago, and Cogin remains friends with several mentors she has had along the way.

“I like to think of it as your mentor becoming your cheer squad,” Cogin says. “They’re watching your career and cheering you on from the sidelines, long after that career guidance and help has ended.”